A truly creative is abnormally, inhumanly sensitive

The truly creative mind in any field is no more than this: a human creature born abnormally, inhumanly sensitive. To him, a touch is a blow, a sound is a noise, a misfortune is a tragedy, a joy is an ecstasy...and failure is death. Add to this...the overpowering necessity to create, create, create — so that without the creating of music or poetry or books or buildings or something of meaning, his very breath is cut off from him...By some strange, unknown, inward urgency he is not really alive unless he is creating.

– Pearl S. Buck

The world is like our brain which is like the web

In an extreme view, the world can be seen as only connections, nothing else ... I liked the idea that a piece of information is really defined only by what it's related to, and how it's related. There really is little else to meaning. The structure is everything. There are billions of neurons in our brains, but what are neurons? Just cells. The brain has no knowledge until connections are made between neurons. All that we know, all that we are, comes from the way our neurons are connected.

– Tim Berners-Lee

Source: Weaving the Web: The Original Design and Ultimate Destiny of the World Wide Web

What junk content diet does to us

Television, radio, and all the sources of amusement and information that surround us in our daily lives are also artificial props. They can give us the impression that our minds are active, because we are required to react to stimuli from the outside. But the power of those external stimuli to keep us going is limited. They are like drugs. We grow used to them, and we continuously need more and more of them. Eventually, they have little or no effect. Then, if we lack the resources within ourselves, we cease to grow intellectually, morally, and spiritually. And we we cease to grow, we begin to die.

– Mortimer J. Adler

Source: How to Read a Book: The Classic Guide to Intelligent Reading

How artists kill their own work

I mean, if anybody wants to understand who I am, they just read my plays...or read my books... Because as soon as you start talking about your art and examining it and analyzing it, you kill it. You absolutely kill it...So long as they continue to question it, and so long as it continues to put them in the unknown and in the questioning mood, I think it has value. When they all of a sudden say,

– Sam Shepard

What's wrong with you?

What I am really saying is that you don’t need to do anything, because if you see yourself in the correct way, you are all as much extraordinary phenomenon of nature as trees, clouds, the patterns in running water, the flickering of fire, the arrangement of the stars, and the form of a galaxy. You are all just like that, and there is nothing wrong with you at all.

– Alan Watts

How limits are defied

On a given day, a given circumstance...you think you have a limit. And you then go for this limit and you touch this limit, and you think, 'Okay, this is the limit.' As soon as you touch this limit, something happens and you suddenly can go a little bit further. With your mind power, your determination, your instinct, and the experience as well, you can fly very high.